Sussex Academic Press - September 2006
352 P.
Table of Contents:
- Transferring Life into Words
- "I Walk with Everyone but Each Step is Mine"
- Poet of His People: 1955-1963
- Exile, Homecoming, Exile: The Aesthetics of Displacement
- War, Metapoetics and Minute Realities: The Later Poetry; Index.
Sa'di Yusuf has long been acknowledged as Iraq's foremost living poet and one of the pre-eminent modernists of Arabic poetry. In this first book-length study in English on the subject, the author seeks to provide a comprehensive look at Yusuf’s literary accomplishments through thematic analysis and close readings that place his texts within wider literary contexts. Encompassing discussions of more than a hundred poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major poet of our time.
"Ever since I began reading Sa’di Yusuf he has become the one who appealed the most to my poetic taste. He is one of our greatest poets. Poetry led him -- or rather he led poetry -- to revolt against the transcendence of poetic language and in its stead to create a new language: one characterised by austerity and its core by the search for essence. In this way poetry in his poems becomes life itself -- life in all its fullness and spontaneity." -- Mahmud Darwish.
"Sa’di Yusuf is a poet of universality and multiple open visions enabling us to discover the poetics of the real world." -- Abbas Beydhoun
"Sa’di Yusuf was born in Iraq, but he has become, through the vicissitudes of history and the cosmopolitan appetites of his mind, a poet, not only of the Arab world, but of the human universe." -- Marilyn Hacker .